Red Cross reunites kids with parents in South Sudan - Business Recorder (blog)

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had flown seven children from Khartoum to South Sudan on Tuesday to reunite them with their parents after years apart. The flight to Juba marked the ICRC's first cross-border reunification of children since South Sudan became the world's newest country last year, the aid agency said in a statement.

"This trip marks the beginning of a new life for these children," said Baptiste Jacobe De Naurois, the ICRC delegate who accompanied them on the flight. The children, aged eight to 16, had been living in a child-care centre in the Sudanese capital, some for several years, ICRC spokesman Jean-Yves Clemenzo told AFP.

The organisation had worked closely with the South Sudan Red Cross to locate the children's families, he said, adding that finding the parents had been a difficult task in a country with very little infrastructure. "It takes a lot of time... It's a long process," he said, adding that during the rainy season especially many remote areas of South Sudan were impossible to get to.

Once the families had been located, there was still a lot of work to be done to obtain travel documents and especially to ensure that they were indeed the parents, that they wanted their children back and that their children wanted to go. "We have to be very careful, because they are children," Clemenzo said.

Once in Juba, the children were placed in the care of local ICRC staff who are set to take them the rest of the way to their families. The ICRC has been working in Sudan since 1978, and opened a delegation in South Sudan when the country became independent from Sudan in July last year after a peace deal that ended a 22-year civil war.